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Thursday, December 15, 2011

Nintendo's 3DS, the portable 3D gaming system, now has a firmware upgrade to allow users to shoot 3D video. The latest version of StereoMovie Maker allows users to output side-by-side files from the footage. This was announced earlier this month, but we wanted to wait until some user-created 3D videos emerged to post about it. Check out the samples below. Don't expect any mind-blowing quality from these, but it is exciting to see 3D video becoming more and more accessible.

"The recent flooding in Thailand has covered a vast territory encompassing an area equivalent to a third of Texas. Over one million people have been directly affected, losing their homes, jobs, and even access to clean drinking water and adequate food supplies. Our cameras just returned from visiting one of the hardest hit areas of the flood, Lamlukka in Pathum Thani province.
These packages of stills from our 3D footage capture the faces of the people most directly affected, from those trapped for weeks in evacuation centers to others who demonstrate their resourcefulness on a daily basis while camped out near their villages on flood-swollen roads and highways.
The packages also include photos of the disaster at Bangkok International Airport, where the entire airport is under several meters of water, and of Don Muang district, another of the hardest hit regions nearby the airport. People continue to endure and persevere under unimaginably harsh conditions, in toxic waters filled with escaped crocodiles and poisonous snakes.
All proceeds from the sale of these photos will go directly to the people of Lamlukka to help them reconstruct their lives as soon as the floodwaters subside."

Santiago Caicedo, the director of COME COCO and UYUYUI!, which won "Best Short Using Synthetic Images" at 3D Stereo Media's Film Festival this year, released this 3D video from StereoAnimationWorkshopRusticResidence on Earth, an animation workshop he taught.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The images were obtained when Dawn was making its approach to Vesta, and while orbiting the giant asteroid in its first science orbit, known as survey orbit, at an altitude of about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers). The video begins with a global view of Vesta from the plane of its equator, where a mysterious band of linear ridges and troughs can be seen. The movie cuts to a flyover of young craters in the northern hemisphere, whose peculiar alignment has led some scientists to refer to them as the "snowman." Then this virtual tour of Vesta takes the viewer around a massive mountain at the south pole of Vesta that is about 16 miles (25 kilometers) high, or more than twice the height of Mt. Everest.

"If you want to know what it's like to explore a new world like Vesta, this new video gives everyone a chance to see it for themselves," Jaumann said. "Scientists are poring over these images to learn more about how the craters, hills, grooves and troughs we see were created."

Vesta is the second most massive object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn is currently spiraling down to its low altitude mapping orbit, which will bring the spacecraft to about 130 miles (210 kilometers) above Vesta's surface.

"Dawn's data thus far have revealed the rugged topography and complex textures of the surface of Vesta, as can be seen in this video," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Soon, we'll add other pieces of the puzzle such as the chemical composition, interior structure, and geologic age to be able to write the history of this remnant protoplanet and its place in the early solar system."

Dawn launched in September 2007 and arrived at Vesta on July 15, 2011. Following a year at Vesta, the spacecraft will depart in July 2012 for the dwarf planet Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015.

Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team.

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn
and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

To follow the mission on Twitter, visit: http://www.twitter.com/NASA_Dawn .